He knew.
Looking at the coffee table, he noted a ruler and a red marker as well as a couple of pencils and pens and a legal pad, supplies she generally carried in her laptop case, and realized for the first time what most of the papers spread out on the table were. “We’re on an island that’s barely inhabited, and you found a map of the southeastern US?”
Turning her attention back to the map, Hollis said absently, “It’s amazing what you can find if you need it.”
“Are you conjuring things out of thin air now?”
She frowned at him.
“Just asking.”
“No, I haven’t sprouted a new ability,” she said dryly. “At least not one that you don’t know about. I just noticed something on the flight over here that my pilot obviously missed.”
“I had other things on my mind,” he said apologetically. “What did I miss?”
“A whole bunch of rolled-up maps behind our seats in the chopper. So I went and looked. And found these.”
He eyed her. “You went out there in the middle of the night wearing nothing but my shirt?” The helicopter sat waiting for them in a clearing some little distance from their cottage.
“Barely inhabited island,” she reminded him.
“Uh-huh. But inhabited. You realize that our landlady’s teenage son is fascinated by you?” A fact he had noted during the occasions when they’d been out on the beach or zipping around on Jet-Skis or scuba diving in the incredibly clear water. When Hollis’s brief swimsuit had shown off much more of her than her normal casual clothing.
Difficult to miss a teenage boy wearing a puppy-dog look of extreme yearning and devotion, even at a distance as he lurked, apparently believing himself hidden. Even more difficult for a powerful telepath to miss the tangled adolescent thoughts practically catapulted their way.
There were only three major structures on their small island: their cottage, a currently empty cottage a couple hundred yards away from theirs, and a much larger building at the other end of the island that served as an inn during the winter months, which were all owned by their widowed landlady, who lived there with her sixteen-year-old son and a small staff of employees who kept the inn and cottages in good order.
Hollis said, “He’s fascinated by the chopper. I caught a glimpse of him lurking in the bushes while I was digging around for the maps.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“It’s nearly dawn. Sun’ll be up soon. I guess he gets up early.”
DeMarco sighed.
She grinned at him.
“You are a sadistic woman,” he told her.
“It’ll keep you on your toes,” she said, not at all apologetically. Then added, “Come look at this, will you?”
He came around the couch to sit beside her, looking obediently at the big map. The legal pad had been pushed to the side, its top sheet at least covered with Hollis’s neat, flowing script in what appeared to be a list, but he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and focused his attention on the map.
There were numerous small, red circles grouped in a rather small area of the southeast, most in the southern Appalachians. And most of the markings clearly indicated towns.
DeMarco studied them for a moment, then straightened to look at his partner. “The locations of past cases?”
“Yeah. It occurred to me that a disproportionate number of cases these last years have taken place in the southeast. Mostly in little mountain towns, but some as far south as Atlanta and as far east as the coast.”
He glanced at her laptop, which was clearly in sleep mode, pushed aside as the legal pad was. Another man might have asked her why she had felt compelled to not only bring along her work laptop on what was supposed to be a completely carefree vacation, but also to actually work.
Reese DeMarco was not another man.
So all he said was, “You keep notes of all the cases the unit works?”
“Nothing classified or even confidential,” she assured him. “Just brief notes I make for myself. Started it with the first case I worked, then later on backtracked to study earlier cases and noted those too. And all the ones since, of course. Locations, who was on the team, the bare outlines of crimes, victims, monsters and whether we caught or destroyed them. And how, if I thought it mattered.”
He nodded. “Okay. And?”
“Well, I know we seldom do geographic profiles of the cases we work in these areas, mostly because it would be fairly useless in such small towns. And I don’t think we’ve ever done a geographic profile of the whole southeast.”
“Probably not,” he agreed.
“I didn’t really know what I was looking for when I got started,” she confessed with a slight frown. “Something was bugging me and I couldn’t ignore it. So . . . I just kept marking the places where we’d had cases. All those little towns, the few times all the action took place outside little towns, like the church and that really weird case-that-wasn’t with Luther and Callie’s location up in the mountains and us at Alexander House.”
DeMarco nodded.
“I marked everything I could find in my case notes, plus a couple of investigations I knew about but in which the SCU was never officially involved because the unit didn’t officially exist at the time—yet Bishop was there, and he got involved. Like that town in North Carolina where his cousin Cassie helped catch a nasty killer, and even Atlanta, where Bishop helped his college friend look for his missing fiancée.”
“News to me,” DeMarco observed. “One of these days you’ll have to tell me those stories.”
“As much as I know, sure. I only found out because I’m nosy and kept asking questions.”
He smiled slightly, his normally rather coldly handsome face both relaxed and softened in a way that would have startled nearly everyone who knew him, but said only, “So you marked all these places in the southeast where . . . paranormal things involving various SCU agents and Haven operatives happened. And?”
She frowned at the map. “There are probably a dozen different ways to do this, but this is the one I picked.” She reached for a sheet of clear plastic he hadn’t noticed underneath the coffee table, on which were drawn several straight lines in red.
“Where on earth did you find that? Not in the chopper?”
“No.” Hollis looked a little guilty. “I took it out of the frame of that print over there.” She nodded toward a suitably tropical print hanging on the wall between two narrow bookcases on the other side of the living room. “I wouldn’t have if it were glass, but . . . Anyway, we might want to slip Mrs. Clairmont a little bonus so she can replace this sheet of plastic.”
“I doubt she’ll even notice,” DeMarco said.
“Yeah, but we know I took it,” Hollis said absently as she slid the plastic over the map and placed it carefully.
He smiled again, but waited until she had the plastic in place and then leaned forward again to study the result for several moments. “Huh.”
“Like I said, probably a dozen different ways to draw lines from one place to another and make some sort of pattern. But this is the one that felt right to me.”
She had drawn, in essence, an asterisk, or perhaps more accurately a kind of sunburst, with straight lines of differing lengths beginning at a marked location on the outer edge of the large cluster and ending at the opposite outer edge, both the starting point and the end point of each line a location of paranormal events, with several others along the line itself.
Every single case she had noted fell along one of the precisely straight lines she had drawn.
“Look at what’s at the center,” she said steadily.
DeMarco looked. “Damn. Prosperity.”
“Yeah. Prosperity. It looks like it’s been at the center of some very bad things for a long time. The very quiet, very peaceful center. Until now.”
After a moment, DeMarco said, “By the time we finish packing and load the chopper, the sun should be up and Mrs. Clairmont as well, so we can turn in the keys. I think we should head for the mountain house ASAP.”
“I think you’re right,” Hollis said.
FIVE